


Patchwork

by togetherboth



Category: Martin and Lewis (RPF)
Genre: Affection, All of the Unresolved Tensions, Friendship, Love, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Pining, Reference to Antisemitism, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, really a lot of pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 08:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20636054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togetherboth/pseuds/togetherboth
Summary: They bruise each other often.





	Patchwork

They bruise each other often. It’s not really meant. Well, the force of it is meant: you’ve got to sell it to make it funny, after all. But you’re supposed to stop short, and sometimes they don’t. Then there’s a sharpness to the connection that’s unintended, that in the moment shocks them.

There’s a big part of Jerry that doesn’t believe that he can actually truly hurt Dean. He kind of thinks that he hasn’t got the strength to generate an impact that wouldn’t just bounce right off his partner’s charisma. And most of the blows do bounce right off, because they’re good at this. They rehearse hard and they know how to pull their punches. And even when they forget, they don’t either of them really notice until they take their shirts off at the end of the night and find bruises and scratches they don’t remember getting. Sometimes Dean finds bites.

“Jesus Christ, Jer. The jolly tiger got hungry tonight, huh?”

It’s choreographed like a dance between them. In their hotel room they stand up on their bed to practise, the reasonable expectation of a soft landing easing the fear of being hurt. Grab the hair, head left, head right, shove down, kick, grab shirt, yank back to standing. Shake. Again. Shake. Again. Until they’re sweating and exhausted, hysterical enough that their neighbour bangs on the wall and yells at them to keep the goddamn noise down, which only makes them worse.

There’s a greedy part of Jerry that just wants to see every last shade in the spectrum of reactions Dean’s capable of having. There’s a vicious part of him that takes this bodily knowledge of his partner and hoards it away in the dark. It’s not stored in his brain. That much he knows. It’s not knowledge that has the quality of thought, it’s darker and heavier; exists in the muscles, reeks of iron. He is somewhere on the borders of being ashamed of it, it’s so gluttonous. But he can’t stop himself from adding to the dragon’s pile, feeling it burn away down there in his marrow.

The thing Jerry really can’t make sense of is that all this knowledge he’s collected feels like it exists in the same place inside him. The heartbreakingly careful tightening of Dean’s arms around him when they hug sits on the shelf next to the grip that crushes his wrists when he tries to pull Dean’s hair. The secret hum he feels in Dean’s throat, the one he can only find when he buries his face in the crook of his partner’s neck and licks, lives next to the gasp he hears when he opens his palm and claps Dean’s cheekbone with a slap that he knows is going to connect harder than it should.

He’s tried thinking of it as an angel and a demon inside him, this craving for knowledge of Dean in extremis. But really he knows that it’s so human he can hardly stand it.

It works both ways too. He wants to let Dean claw every possible response out of him, even the ones that would hurt. He knows now what it feels like when Dean roughs him up some on stage, makes him yell a bit and take a pratfall. But what if he really made Dean furious? He’s been smacked in the face plenty of times, but he still wants the specific experience of being smacked in the face by Dean.

He’s seen Dean silently consider a heckler’s request that ‘the Jew’ should ‘get off the fucking stage’, before laying the guy out with one punch right there in the middle of the crowd. Why should some random asshole get that from Dean, but not him? In the moment he feels jealous, then he notices himself feeling jealous and feels sick.

He knows in his heart that there’s a well of affection in Dean, one with an undisturbed surface that he’s barely even skimmed, and that magnetises him every bit as much as the darkness does. He wants to drag these loving things out of Dean too, longs to see what feats of tenderness he has the capacity to inspire. He knows that Dean’s big hand wrapped around the nape of his neck makes his spine feel like a lit candle. But what would that hand feel like at the small of his back, under his shirt, stroking his skin?

He wonders if Dean gets this hungry for him too. He can’t tell yet; Dean gives nothing away and it takes a lot of work to draw anything out of him. He likes being close, Jerry can tell that much at least. He does a lot of his talking by not talking but touching. Jerry’s starting to suspect, just very softly beginning to think, that Dean might actually be the gentlest person he’s ever met. And what’s he supposed to do with that information, how the hell is he supposed to find room for that?

Because at the same time he knows for a hard fact that Dean has busted his knuckles open on other men’s faces. He’s seen it with his own eyes and sees the history of it every day in his partner’s swollen fingers and aching joints, in the zigzag of his right pinky that nobody cared enough to set straight. What kind of a life provokes a person that tenderhearted into casual violence? Everything about Dean makes Jerry’s heart hurt.

Sometimes he takes Dean’s fingers between his own palms and tries to warm the aches away. He’s not sure how much it helps, but Dean lets him do it so it must at least be okay. Sometimes Dean even curls his fingers a little and scritches softly at Jerry’s palm. Jerry mustn’t look at him when he does that, because if you look at Dean too closely while he’s doing something sweet he will stop. But he finds that if he catches it just right, keeps ahold of Dean’s ragged hand but pretends his focus is elsewhere, then he can sneak a look out of the corner of his eye without being looked at in return. If he can manage that then, somewhere between the delicate brush of Dean’s fingers on his palm and the faraway look in his eyes, he gets a glimpse of a world he’d love to be invited into. A world that’s inside Dean somewhere under the laughing and brawling and not giving a fuck. 

There are rivers there. And woods and wild horses and big skies and silence and a very, very solitary little boy who’s somehow fallen into the gap between two languages. Jerry’s caught his shadow here and there, but he hasn’t met him yet. He hopes that he’s waiting for a lonely little boy from New Jersey, with a twisted spine and cotton from his grandmother’s sewing machine still caught in his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to write something else and this came out instead. Often the way, right? 
> 
> Not part of the _Autumn in New York_ series I was meant to be working on: I think this is set a little bit later in their partnership, but still very early days.


End file.
